


it should've been someone else

by juggyjones



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Canon Compliant, F/M, it follows the canon okay, kind of??, season one, the first few episodes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-22
Updated: 2018-08-22
Packaged: 2019-07-01 02:02:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15764343
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juggyjones/pseuds/juggyjones
Summary: She walks past Bellamy, greeting him with a nod.She doesn’t see his hand reaching for her when she’s walking away, and almost catching shirt, only to fall empty.Alone, in the tent, when Finn is away working or scouting or doing whatever Finn does, sometimes she talks to them. She tells them about the life on Earth, about what they had to do to survive, about the dangers. She tells them about how she knows Finn isn’t the one because he doesn’t call her ‘princess’ the right way, or how much she hates that when Bellamy does it feels almost familiar, when it shouldn’t. Because she hates Bellamy, and lets them know it.Her soulmate couldn’t be cocky, or mean, or selfish.All this time, she fails to notice Bellamy’s suddenly covering the entirety of his skin, avoiding her as much as he possibly can.When she gets a reply, in the middle of writing something to them, it stings.it should’ve been someone else.or, clarke and bellamy may be soulmates who can see whatever the other writes on their skin, but landing on the ground is brings them together.





	it should've been someone else

**Author's Note:**

> hi! i know this has been overdone and i'm not used to writing soulmate aus, but this was requested by megan (@griffinsbellamy on tumblr) so i hope it's at least somewhat decent??

When Clarke was two and she smudged crayons on her stomach, drawing herself the way she thought she looked—like a princess—her mother caught her and scolded her. Her father, on the other hand, told her about soulmates.

Draw, write, add a layer of anything to your skin purposefully, and your soulmate will see.

It’s her earliest memory.

‘Why doesn’t everyone paint on their skin?’ she asked, in a childish blabber that her father somehow understood. ‘It makes their soulmates happy.’

She remembers Jake giving her a sad smile, one that he gave her again only years later, when he was being shut out of an airlock.

‘Not everyone has one.’

‘You and Mommy do!’

‘No, sweetheart, we don’t. We found each other on our own.’

At the time, she didn’t understand. She started to, once she fell in love with someone who wasn’t her soulmate. But then the relationship broke apart, and she was back to dreaming about the ideal someone holding the other end of the red string.

 _Dreaming_. That’s all it was.

When Clarke was seven and she wrote her first hello, she did it with the foam from her excess toothpaste. No response came back, and she tried a few more times through the next few weeks, but she was always met with silence.

For the next few years, she didn’t think about soulmates. Maybe she, like her parents, didn't have one. It would be odd that on a ship with a few thousand people, her soulmate would be here.

That’s her dad’s theory, anyway.

‘It’s not that we weren’t meant to have soulmates,’ he told her once, when she was eleven. ‘Maybe they were supposed to be born later, or earlier, or from someone who died in the war. We’ll never know.’

 _We’ll never know_ became a phrase Clarke got used to. Maybe she’ll never know whether she has a soulmate, or who they might be.

Whatever happens, she plans on choosing the person she’ll spend her life with. No words on her skin would tell her that.

It works. She dates. It’s good and bad, but deep down, it feels like none of the relationships could work out because they didn’t have her marks on their skin. A silly thought, that’s all it should be – but it’s one she can’t get rid of. It’s like tingling in the back of her neck.

She still talks to them – her soulmate. It’s mostly with toothpaste, but sometimes it’s with real paint or crayons or graphite, if she’s lucky.

She’s sixteen when she finds markings on her skin that don’t belong to her.

**u hre**

Clarke runs to the pile of dust her mother cleaned earlier that day, puts it into a small glass and spits into it, stirring with a brush until it forms a unit firm enough she can use it to make marks on her skin.

It’s gross. But she has nothing else on her.

 **Yes** , she replies.

**ark**

**Alpha**

**prncss** , appears beneath her last word. The handwriting is smudgy and it seems like they are using a method similar to hers – maybe they’re poor. Maybe they can’t afford things like she can.

But of course they’d make fun of her when she was two.

**srry 4 nt wrtng sonr**

She can hardly understand them.

To make some space, she spits on her arm and runs her fingers across it, smudging the words until she's certain her new words will be visible. The person does the same, and their arms are clean.

 **It’s ok** , she writes. **Don’t call me princess.**

**grls frm alfa r princss**

It makes Clarke smile, irritated as she is. They talk, for hours, but she knows nothing about them. When they leave, Clarke realizes what this means - she not only has a soulmate, but they're not much older than her if Pike taught them, too.

Some days, they talk. Some days, she paints to them. Some days, she guesses who they could be.

Some days, there’s silence.

On her seventeenth birthday, she’s alone in her bed, thinking about them. It's the most beautiful moonrise outside, and the party was good until they asked for ID, but she feels lonely.

Then she sees her knuckles, red and worsening, and realizes it’s not just paint or similar soulmates can see.

It’s self harm, too.

Her knuckles redden even more. Both fists, now.

 **You ok?** she writes on her forearm, using a pen.

They don’t reply for a while, so she writes the same words under her right knuckles.

 **no** , comes minutes later.

**Want to talk?**

**leav m alon.**

And she does. She’d want to be alone, if she was going through some shit.

A month later, she’s arrested and it’s her own knuckles that are reddening and cracked, and they ask the same question.

She has nothing to reply with.

They talk to her, sometimes, in the next year or so. They talk about the day or ask questions, wonder where she went, or talk about her paintings. Sometimes they admit they miss her. She tries to mix dust with her spit to message them, but it’s never visible on her arm.

Sometimes it helps to know that they’re out there, even if she’s never going to meet them. To know their name.

And they’ll never know hers, either.

So when she gets the chance to live, and Finn calls her princess, she thinks he might be the one. Only something feels off, like in every relationship she ever had. Like something, a crucial part is missing.

He doesn’t say ‘princess’ the way her soulmate writes **princss**. It should be both aggressive and gentle, nothing like Finn’s.

When Bellamy Blake says it, Clarke thinks there’s something about it, something familiar, and it makes her mad.

When Finn brings her pencils, she writes on her arm.

 **I’m alive** , she writes on her wrist. No response comes, and she realizes that she has another chance with them. Life isn’t a game anymore.

There’s only now or never, and soulmates should be forever.

So, she writes on her palm, **My name is Clarke Griffin.**

Nothing happens.

**I’m on Earth. I couldn’t respond because I was in solitary**

Maybe they can’t see.

She writes the words on her ankles, below her knuckles, all while thinking about how they got her through the worst period of her life. How much knowing that they’re out there, free to write, how much it helped.

So, she writes it. Her stomach and her legs and her arms are a love letter to the stranger she might never know.

When she arrives back to the camp and sees Bellamy’s body covered in fabric with skin only visible on his face, she thinks he got into a fight. She doesn’t connect the dots just yet. She doesn’t notice how his hands tremble when he notices her, or how he looks at them as if he’s seeing a phantom.

Clarke doesn’t notice because she’s too busy thinking about her soulmate, wondering why they chose to not reply. This is big deal for her – this is what she’s been waiting for her entire life. Maybe when everyone comes down, she’ll get to finally meet them.

She walks past Bellamy, greeting him with a nod.

She doesn’t see his hand reaching for her when she’s walking away, and almost catching shirt, only to fall empty.

Alone, in the tent, when Finn is away working or scouting or doing whatever Finn does, sometimes she talks to them. She tells them about the life on Earth, about what they had to do to survive, about the dangers. She tells them about how she knows Finn isn’t the one because he doesn’t call her ‘princess’ the right way, or how much she hates that when Bellamy does it feels almost familiar, when it shouldn’t. Because she hates Bellamy, and lets them know it.

Her soulmate couldn’t be cocky, or mean, or selfish.

All this time, she fails to notice Bellamy’s suddenly covering the entirety of his skin, avoiding her as much as he possibly can.

When she gets a reply, in the middle of writing something to them, it stings.

**it should’ve been someone else.**

She puts her pen away and smudges all her words. Their words stay, under her wrist, painfully visible with no means of hiding them.

It’s cold in her tent. It’s night and Finn hasn’t come back yet, and the makeshift bed isn’t comfortable and the blankets aren’t warm enough and she keeps glancing at her wrist, knowing that her soulmate hates her every time.

In the morning, she writes something she never thought she would. Spite is gone, sadness lingers, but it’s reason that wins.

**Why?**

She doesn’t wait long for a response.

**because i am going to disappoint you**

She takes a pen to write a reply, but she sees other words, new words, forming right under the last statement.

**because you already hate me**

So she writes, **I could never hate you** , and under it, **Who are you?**

 **you don’t want to know** and **it’s better if you don’t**

**We’re soulmates. That should account for something.**

**not this**

**Just tell me who you are**

**I can’t**

No matter what else she tells them, when she asks if she knows them, they don’t say a word. Her skin contains only her own words now, because they smudged theirs, and she does the same.

She tries to forget about them.

When Finn’s girlfriend lands and Clarke finds herself in between a long, trusting relationship, she removes herself out of the equation without hesitation. But she’s hurt, and she has to tell _someone_ , only Wells is dead and her mother killed her father and she’s _fucking alone._

So she tells them, everything.

And they talk to her. They calm her down. They listen, or whatever is the reading equivalent of it, and they’re here for her when she needs them, and she knows she could never hate them.

And then it clicks – when Clarke realizes her mystery soulmate has a distinct voice in her head. Deep and raspy, his head tilted to the side in snark when he calls her princess, cockiness that somehow does fit in the vision of her soulmate after all. It’s a he, and he thinks she hates him because they’re constantly butting heads, because they both want to do the right thing and sometimes they disagree on what it is.

It’s late, middle of the night almost, after they realized Bellamy accidentally caused the deaths of hundreds of people that she knows he’ll need her, too.

So she writes, **Come to my tent.**

They don’t respond.

Clarke bites her lip when she adds, **please, Bellamy**

And he comes. It’s almost an hour later and he looks like a mess, and now she can connect the boy she’d been falling in love with for several years now with the boy she thought she hated. He looks broken, almost, and she knows the deaths are taking a bigger toll on him than he lets everyone think. She doesn’t need him to say it to know it, because she knows him almost as well as he knows himself.

They never traded personal information that could identify either of them, but they traded in personalities.

He stands at the entrance to her tent, wet from the rain, shaking slightly as she knows he’s freezing.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

Clarke takes a blanket and wraps it around him, tucking it under his neck so she’s certain it’ll warm him up. She doesn’t look at him when she helps him take off his jacket, because her tent is warmer than the outside and he can’t return his body heat if he’s soaking wet. Without speaking, he takes off his shirt, too, and tries to feel nothing at the sight of his toned body bare in front of her. He takes off his own pants, and Clarke steps back, taking her shirt off, too.

He cocks his eyebrows, more confused than amused.

“Naked bodies provide more heat,” she explains. “If we don’t do this, you might start feeling hypothermic.” _And we can’t lose you._

Bellamy nods, shy all of a sudden. She climbs into the bed next to him and lies down, trying not to feel self-conscious about him seeing in her underwear. But he’s just as exposed as he is, and it makes her feel a little better.

He lies down. They’re facing one another. She pulls a blanket over them and now, up close, she can see his cheeks are red and eyes bloodshot and her nose is red, too.

Part of her thinks he deserved it. She kills that part – he did it because he was trying to protect himself, and he didn’t know what would happen. She knows he wouldn’t have done it if he knew it would lead to so many deaths – or deaths, the end. She knows it because she knows him.

She clears her throat.

“Big spoon or small spoon?”

He grins. “Big spoon.”

“Fine. But it’s better if we’re as close as possible, so I’ll actually be lying on top of you, pretty much.”

Bellamy laughs. It still sounds a little stiffed, a little held back, but it’s a laugh nonetheless.

She places herself on top of him, almost. Her head is on his chest and his arm is on her back, the other one on the arm she sprawled across his torso. He’s softer than she imagined, and comfortable, and smells like earth and rain and sweat and she never thought she’d like something like that so much.

There is a part of her that still sees him as Bellamy Blake, who tried to kill the Chancellor to get on the dropship – but that’s the same Bellamy who did it to protect his sister, tried to rule some order into a bunch of delinquents, and was incredibly intelligent.

He’s also her soulmate, on top of that.

“I don’t want you to hate me,” he whispers. She feels the words on the top of her head, his lips pressed against her hair. “I did—”

“You couldn’t know.” She blames him, a little bit, but he blames himself a lot more.

“I should’ve—” his voice cracks. “You said all those bad stuff about me, and I tried to be better, and it just—It fell apart, Clarke. I can’t just left it go.”

“Then live for them. Make it up to them by being the best version of yourself you can be – the one who kept me sane while I was in solitary for a fucking year.”

She still can’t bear to look at him. He might be crying, the way he’s holding onto her, and she doesn’t want to see that. It will break her heart, too.

It seems there is nothing Bellamy wants to say—or words he can find—so she runs her thumb over one of his arms. “We sleep tonight and worry tomorrow.”

And they do.

In the morning, she wakes up alone, but it’s the good kind of alone. It feels like something ghas shifted between them, and maybe he’ll be more like the guy she came to know over the years than the person she met days ago.

So she takes a pen, smiles at her empty arms, and just above her elbow, she writes:

**I could never be disappointed if it’s you.**


End file.
